According to the left, I am now a member of a treasonous group. I cheered when President Obama and his newly made-over milquetoast wife made asses of themselves in Copenhagen while attempting to wheedle the Europeans into granting Chicago the 2016 Olympics. And I gnashed my teeth when the Nobel Prize Committee decided to fete Obama with the Peace Prize. So, that makes me an America-hater.
“Why, oh why, do conservatives hate America so?” asks Eugene Robinson of the Washington Post, singling out Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck as paradigmatic of the conservative “hate America” movement. “The problem for the addlebrained Obama-rejectionists is that the president, as far as they concerned, couldn’t possible do anything right, and thus is unworthy of any conceivable recognition.”
No, Eugene, that isn’t the problem for us. Here’s our problem: President Obama seeks an America that resembles modern France far more than the free and prosperous America our forefathers fought and bled and died for. President Obama’s America is not America: It is the United Nations writ large, with socialist redistribution at its center and moral relativism at its core. I root against President Obama’s America because I don’t want to see it become a reality. And the only way it will become a reality is if President Obama is able to make it a reality.
And so I root for events that drain away Obama’s political capital.
I rooted against him when he visited Copenhagen to bring the Olympics home. That’s not because I opposed the Olympics going to Chicago—a Chicago Olympics would have been great. I rooted against Obama because if he had achieved his goals with regard to the Olympics, too many Americans would have thought that such success somehow legitimated his agenda here at home—an agenda totally at odds with all notions of constitutionality, limited government, and liberty of enterprise and thought. By winning in Copenhagen, he would have raised his chances of ramming through his domestic and foreign policy programs—and that’s the last thing I want to see.
I was enraged when Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize. That’s not simply because I think he didn’t deserve it, though he clearly doesn’t. It’s because the Peace Prize was just another sop to Obama’s inflated ego. It was a blatant attempt by the “world community” to hand Obama a personal consolation prize for his fiasco in Copenhagen. It was their attempt to screw his courage to the sticking place, to reinforce his self-inflicted perception that he is a world leader destined to direct America toward a more global future.
The Nobel Committee gave Obama the Peace Prize because he has already demonstrated real commitment to undermining American strength on the world stage, and they want to see him follow through on that commitment.
In short, I don’t root against President Obama because I hate America. I root against President Obama because I hate his vision for America.
It is those like President Obama who see America as a dark and dangerous place that requires earth-shaking change along European lines. It is those like President Obama who feel that Americans are nothing special—and that America is nothing special. As Obama himself put it: “I believe in American exceptionalism, just as I suspect that the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism.” In other words, America is not exceptional—it’s just because we live here that we feel it is. And the American people are not exceptional—they are merely Greeks or Brits or Russians or Chinese or Frenchmen born within our borders, with values no better or worse than their foreign compatriots.
Obama’s belief in America’s unexceptionalism—his view that America’s government, not her people, is the formative force in her values; his view that the American people bear the stain of racial, sexual and military guilt; his view that America must abandon her scrupulous adherence to equality of opportunity in favor of equality of result, traditional morals in favor of alternative ethics, and liberty of enterprise in favor of redistributionism—that set of beliefs is antithetical to what makes America great.
So yes, I hate Obama’s America. Because Obama’s America isn’t America—it’s the European view of America, implemented from high office. Opposing the total redefinition of America isn’t anti-American; it’s patriotic. And opposing those, like Obama, who push for that drastic redefinition, isn’t “hating America”—it’s fighting in favor of the America that ended slavery, built the greatest economic empire in world history and liberated tens of millions around the globe. If that isn’t patriotic, I don’t know what is.
By Ben Shapiro
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